Oral history interview with Joanne Rosenbaum who was born in Vancouver, 1930.

Oral history interview with Hilda Everall who was born in Germany in 1923. Her interview discusses her experiences growing up in Germany, the rise of Nazism, wartime in England and her time in Vancouver where she engaged with the Jewish community such as through joining the National Council of Jewish Women and the Holocaust Education Centre.

Oral history interview with Susan (nee Ricardo) Quastel, who was born in the Netherlands, 1923. She lost her sister and parents to the Holocaust. Susan worked as a nurse throughout the war in Holland, than began studied nursing and a course on matrons at Oxford. Susan came to Vancouver primarily because of her husband who was from Vancouver. Susan is a member of the National Council of Jewish Women, Vancouver chapter of Hadassah, Jewish Family Services, of Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University and has helped research at the Vancouver Holocaust Society.

Oral History of Susan Quastel. Mrs. Quastel was born in Amsterdam in 1923. During the early part of WW2 she worked at the Jewish Hospital in Amsterdam. After the war she moved to London, where she had family. While in the UK, she trained to be a nurse at Charing Cross Hospital. She then went to Israel, where her sister lived, and worked at Hadassah Hospital. During her time in Israel, she met her husband, who was from Vancouver, at the Hebrew University. She moved to Canada with him and they got married here. In Vancouver, she worked for many Jewish organizations including Hadassah, The National Council of Jewish Women, the Vancouver chapter of Canadian Friends of The Hebrew University, and the Zack Gallery.

Oral history interview with Dan Sonnenschein on his mother Bronia Sonnenschein, who was born in Vienna in 1915. Dan talks about his mother’s experience during the war. She was smuggled into Poland after the annexation but ended up living most of the war in the Lodz Ghetto before being sent to camps in 1944. After the war she moved to Prague, where she worked for the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. She got married in Prague and they moved first to Haifa Israel then Vancouver in 1950. Dan’s Father died in 1952. She got a job and raised her children as a single mother. After she retired, she volunteered with many organizations, including JCC and congress. She did a lot of work for holocaust education in BC by going on tours and giving talks to school groups and other organizations.

Oral History interview with Leon Broitman. Leon was born in 1922 in the USSR. He talks about the Ukrainian Holocaust and living in the USSR under Stalin. He started studying to become a teacher but was drafted and subsequently wounded during WW2 and never completed his education. After the war he came to Canada and became a cutter (Tailor) in Montreal. He then moved to Ottawa and opened a store. He also started an investment company that was still in business at the time of the interview (2013). He closed is store in Ottawa and moved to BC. He had 4 children with his wife and talks about them and their careers. Much of the interview is about Soviet Union history and talking about WW2 and the Germans.

Oral history interview with Dr. Peter Suedfeld. Peter Suedfeld was born in Hungary and emigrated to the United States in 1948. After three years of active duty in the US Army, he received his bachelor's degree from Queens College of the City University of New York in 1960 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1963. He taught at the University of Illinois and at University College, Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey before moving to The University of British Columbia (UBC), where he was appointed Professor of Psychology in 1972. He served as Department Chairman at Rutgers from 1967-72, and at UBC as Head of the Department of Psychology from 1972-1984 and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies from 1984-1990. In 2001, he was appointed Dean Emeritus of Graduate Studies and Professor Emeritus of Psychology. Suedfeld has held Canada Council and Killam Foundation Fellowships, and sabbatical or concurrent appointments as Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales, Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Ohio State University, and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies.

His research is generally concerned with how human beings adapt to and cope with novelty, challenge, stress, and danger. The research has three major aspects: laboratory and clinical studies on restricted environmental stimulation (for example, in flotation tanks); field research on psychological and psycho-physiological concomitants of working in extreme and unusual environments such as space and polar stations; and the archival and experimental study of information processing and decision making under uncertainty and stress. Archival and interview studies have concentrated on leaders at the national and international levels, but have also included combat officers, prisoners, and students. During the past ten years, he has been conducting an extensive series of studies of the long-term adaptation of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. He is the author of more than 200 journal articles and book chapters. Among books that he has written, edited or co-edited are: Personality Theory and Information Processing, Attitude Change: The Competing Views, Restricted Environmental Stimulation: Research and Clinical Applications, Psychology and Torture, Restricted Environmental Stimulation: Theoretical and Empirical Developments in Flotation REST, Psychology and Social Policy, and most recently (2001), Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Survivors and Refugees. He has presented invited and keynote addresses at many institutions and conferences in North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and New Zealand.

Suedfeld has served as Co-Editor of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and Book Review Editor of Political Psychology; he is currently Associate Editor of Environment and Behavior. He is also on the editorial boards of Political Psychology, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and the Interamerican Journal of Psychology. He was the organizer and director of the Polar Psychology Project, a multi-national, transpolar project investigating human adaptation to high-latitude environments, as well as of the High Arctic Psychology Research Station near the magnetic North Pole. He has served as an expert witness in US and Canadian courts, and as a consultant to the Canadian Department of National Defence, NASA, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, the Canadian Space Agency, and the US Peace Corps.

Among other organizational offices, he has been President of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Western Association of Graduate Deans; he was the founding President of the International REST Investigators' Society; and has been Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Antarctic Research Program. In that capacity, he represented Canada in the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). He represents both Canada and the International Union of Psychological Science in the SCAR Standing Scientific Group in Life Sciences. He was the co-founder with M.E.P. Seligman, then President of the American Psychological Association, of the American/Canadian Psychological Associations' Joint Initiative on Ethnopolitical Warfare, and continues as a member of its Steering Committee. He has been Vice President and a member of the Governing Council of the International Society of Political Psychology, and is or was a member of various committees of the American and Canadian Psychological Associations and the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, as well as other scientific organizations.

Suedfeld has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association (6 Divisions), the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1994, he was awarded the U.S. National Science Foundation's Antarctica Service Medal; in 1996, the Donald O. Hebb Award of the Canadian Psychological Association for distinguished contributions to psychology as a science; in 2000, the Zachor Award of the Canadian government for contributions to Canadian society, and the Just Desserts Award of the UBC Alma Mater Society for service to students; and in 2001, the Harold D. Lasswell Award for distinguished scientific contributions to political psychology. In 2002, he was named as the Monna and Otto Weinmann Memorial Lecturer by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Oral history interview with Helen Waldstein Wilkes. Helen was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936. In the spring of 1939, Helen and her family left their home in Czechoslovakia and immigrated to Canada to escape the Nazis. Helen felt like an outsider during her early years in Canada, but she was educated in Ontario and excelled in school and eventually received her PhD in French Literature.

She spent most of her career as a teacher of French and French education in Vancouver. Around the time of her retirement, Helen became more deeply interested in her Jewish heritage. She is now an active member of the Or Shalom congregation. In 2010 she published 'Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery,' a well-received book which describes her discovery of the desperate letters sent to her parents from relatives who were still trapped in Europe as the Holocaust began, and her growing engagement with her own cultural inheritance.

Throughout Helen's life, reading and philosophy have helped her to make sense of the world and the meaning of her life.

Oral history interview with Jack Micner about his father Chaim Micner in preparation for the 2014 Scribe with a focus on Jewish scrap metal dealers. Chaim Micner came to Canada in 1948 , to make a fresh start after surviving the Holocaust. He built a scrap metal business, Atlantic Metals, and found a loving family in his wife, Susy, his children, and grandchildren. His son Jack Micner is on the Board of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre; Jack works to educate people about the Holocaust, so its message of warning to humanity will not be forgotten.

Chaim Micner died early on June 25, 2013 three weeks after turning 90. Born May 31, 1923 in Bilgoraj, Poland, he was the third of eight children, and spent World War II working at the Stalinskaya coal mine in Siberia, where he learned to dance nimbly and befriended the canteen waitresses for leftovers. He arrived in Quebec City in October 1948, aboard the SS Cynthia, from the Bergen- Belsen DP camp. When he arrived in Vancouver, after passing a series of blizzards on a westward train, people were playing frisbee in shorts. He worked as a presser for Sweet Sixteen, and met his wife Susy, of 59 years, in 1953. They married a year later and had three children: Fay (Roy Weiss), Jack (Karen) and Sam. Chaim then built a scrap-metal business, buying the Atlantic Metals junkyard with his partner Joe Lewin. He played poker on Tuesdays, fished avidly for carp in the Sumas River and Deas Slough, watched hockey, football and boxing routinely, grew cherry tomatoes, green onions and cucumbers, spoke seven languages and made legendary matzoh brie at Passover. Canada offered Chaim peace, stability and calm after a traumatic early life, and he saw his grandchildren Tamara, Mia, Mimi, Baruch, Yecheskyl and Zalman as his greatest achievement.